Turns out there is an ‘I’ in team

When it comes to learning and retaining complex skills, a new study from Texas A&M University uncovered a surprising finding: in the context of teams, having employees practice skills alone may be the best way to help the team succeed.

The study, published in the journal Human Performance, was led by Dr. Winfred Arthur Jr., professor of psychology in the Texas A&M College of Arts and Sciences. Its findings offer insights into how individuals and teams acquire, lose and reacquire skills.

In a controlled lab study, 81 participants working in 27 three-person teams used a simulation called “Crisis in the Kodiak: Oil rig Search and Rescue” in which they took on roles of oil rig workers, helicopter aviators and boat captains to rescue survivors of an oil rig fire and put out the fire. After two days of training, they returned an average of 73 days later to test how much they remembered.

The twist? Some participants began the refresher session working individually, while others started as a team. The difference in performance was dramatic.

Researchers found that although compared to individuals, teams learn faster together, they also forget faster, unless they first refresh their skills individually. Why is this the case? Arthur notes that, “One of the jokes in our lab is that if one does not acquire any knowledge or skill, then one has nothing to lose. And so that might be one explanation here for why teams may, relatively speaking, lose more skill than individuals: if teams acquire more skill, then they in turn, all things being equal, have more skill to lose.”

But pertaining to refresher practice, why does individual practice seem to help team performance more than team practice helps individual performance?

“In teams — where individuals assume and perform one or a specific set of roles — individual practice provides the opportunity to practice and gain an appreciation of and familiarity with the whole task. That would not be the case if one just performed only one’s role within the team,” Arthur said. “Team practice would, of course, not help individual performance much because again with team practice one is limited to only one’s role, whereas when performing the task as an individual, one has to assume all the roles that comprise the task.”

This insight supports training strategies like cross-training and job rotation, which expose team members to multiple roles and responsibilities.

The findings have important implications for organizations that rely on high-performing teams, including the military, emergency response units and corporate project groups.

“The clear recommendation is that after a period of nonuse, to the extent that it is possible to do so, skill recovery or retraining activities should commence with trainees being given the opportunity to run through or perform the whole task by themselves before transitioning to the team training mode,” Arthur said.

Although the study was conducted in a lab setting with college students in collocated teams, Arthur believes the findings could apply to remote and distributed teams as well.

By Lesley Henton, Texas A&M University Division of Marketing and Communications

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